


On the Subject of Love, Film Geeks, and Unwilling Horticulture

by charliewalkertexasranger



Category: Scream (Movies)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon Gay Character, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, One Shot, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 13:04:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14832798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charliewalkertexasranger/pseuds/charliewalkertexasranger
Summary: He looks down at it as soon as he's sure nothing's left in him.A single flower petal.It's drenched in a flood of red, sticky blood, always a shade darker than the movies make it look.





	On the Subject of Love, Film Geeks, and Unwilling Horticulture

He's sitting on his bed on some old Saturday, debating internally whether to start up the webcast for the day now or do it later, after he meets up with Charlie, when it happens for the first time.

Something small enough that, if unmoving, would have been unnoticeable, unfurls into something larger within the confines of his lungs, making breathing impossible, and a clenching feeling seizes his gut, clawing, fighting, and, with no other indication but the feeling of panic whirling in his mind, something soft runs up his throat in a rush of heat and moisture. Even in the shock of the moment, the shock of the sudden sensations, he tries to justify it to himself, as soon as he has a grasp on what's happening to him. At first, he thinks he's vomiting, just out of the blue, for no discernible reason. He's felt like he's had a massive backpack strapped to him for the last couple of days, perpetually winded and out of breath, breathing heavily when he goes up stairs or walks more than a few feet or even just stands up a little too long; maybe he's getting sick.

And he's thoroughly correct, about being sick, but not in the way he believes he is.

He gags on the fluid and on the heat as it bobs into his mouth and fills his senses with the metallic taste and scent of copper, and, then, his lips open to let it out, and he catches what was inside him in his cupped hand in a desperate but failed attempt to keep his clothes and bed clean.

He looks down at it as soon as he's sure nothing's left in him.

A single flower petal.

It's drenched in a flood of red, sticky blood, always a shade darker than the movies make it look.

He holds it there, deeply uncertain about and completely paralyzed by what he's seen. For more than a moment, he thinks he's mistaken on what it is. It has to be a thin piece of flesh, or something much more explainable by basic logic. There's so much blood that it obscures the color, soddens the texture; he hopes that, perhaps, he's just misled by the shape and flimsiness of whatever it is just came out of him.

But he knows a flower petal when he sees it. He studies it in his fingers, poking it around as he seeks confirmation. It is surreal, and impossible to explain through means he knows of. The petal is as delicate as tissue paper, as soft as velvet, and the exact shape he would expect a petal to be, all the things that would lead him to identify something as a flower petal. He has no other explanation. It is a flower petal.

Robbie can take a suspension of disbelief like no one else; when it comes to movies, he'll defend even the most unrealistic and overly complex. But he can't believe this. He has no fucking idea how this could have happened, and it's spreading panic through his very soul. But despite that panic, panic which makes his fingers shake and the petal tremble in turn, he considers all of the normal, plausible explanations first. Did he eat a flower petal any time recently? Maybe it was poisonous and it eroded his esophagus as it came back up, explaining the blood.

But he doesn't remember having eaten something like that, and not recently enough for it to still be intact inside him. Maybe, when he had his window open earlier, the wind blew it into his mouth and down his throat. He's sure he would have felt that, though.

So he does what any sane teenager would do in the digital world of 2010, and he Googles his symptoms.

After washing his hands, of course.

His mother's already left for work, and his stepfather's out in the driveway, working on his car; Robbie can see him through his window, poking around beneath the hood with a wrench. He doesn't like his stepfather very much—he persistently tries to get Robbie to be manlier, as if horror films and technology weren't manly enough pursuits. But Robbie knows it's not his interests that spur his stepfather to be so obsessive about his masculinity. It's something else, something that his stepfather must just see in him, because he's never confessed.

That something is something that he's very insecure about.

Thankfully, now that the only other person around for the morning is busy, he can go rinse off all of this blood in peace, without anyone questioning him. The last thing he wants is someone to question him, a reminder that this isn't normal, that he might be dying.

He just coughed up a flower petal, all his friends are fakes who just want the attention of his webcast, his stepfather knows he's gay, and his best friend, the only one who really cares about him, will never feel the same way for Robbie that Robbie does for him. Robbie's life is hard enough without people telling him left and right to see a doctor. Or, at least, he imagines things will be better without that. He's never had that happen before.

He goes across the hallway, to the bathroom, and huddles over the sink in his bloody clothes. How he plans to explain the clothes being bloody, he has no idea. But he'll try to hide what he can, and he _can_ hide the blood on his hands.

He places the petal on the counter, smudging it with his blood, and rinses himself off. His vision is still blurred at the edges, and even leaning over a solid surface, he feels unsteady, unstable, like he could fall over and collapse at any moment, but he manages to stay upright and finish the job.

Once he's clean, running his hands over and over each other until the blood is pink in the basin and then absent, he decides that he wants to see the color of the petal. He reaches for the handle on the faucet and turns the water down, as not to damage it—he doesn't want to damage a medical impossibility—and, then, he grips it between two fingers and runs it under the piddling stream.

The blood washes away despite his thinking that it wouldn't and that the color would be forever obscured. At first, everything appears pinkish, but, then he sees it, identifies it for what it is. Curled at the edges like it should be ruffled up in a carnation or a peony, though perhaps bent that way from the impact of the water, it is a vibrant shade of yellow, one Robbie associates with pleasant memories. When he and Charlie were finding the location for the first Stab-a-Thon, they were out in a thicket ten miles from town, searching for a fabled abandoned house that had swished through the Woodsboro High rumor mill since long before they had started attending. Charlie tripped and fell over a particularly thick clump of brambles and took Robbie down with him, and they landed in a patch of wild yellow carnations, smaller and sleeker than their domesticated counterparts but still scattering a storm of sun-colored petals around them as the pair collapsed and sent the plants bowing down with them. Charlie landed right on top of Robbie, knocking the wind out of him and filling his body with shock and surprise and some other feeling he wasn't sure how to place at the time but that ended up being something that came to him later, when he reflected back on the incident.

Desire.

Their breaths were hot against each other, lips merely an inch apart. Feeling Charlie's slender body pressed so tightly to his chest ignited something in Robbie's very soul, and from that moment on, though the idea had swept through him before that he felt something for Charlie, Robbie knew that he was gay, and that he loved Charlie as more than a friend.

Robbie blinks wildly.

He has no idea what to think.

He pats the petal dry with the end of his shirt, and when he goes back in his room to change his soiled clothes and try to find an explanation for his symptoms, he places it on his desk. It's something worth keeping, since it defies all Robbie thought he knew about human biology.

He just hopes this isn't going to hurt him any more than it already has. His only other option is ending up in a clinic being prodded and bothered and forced into tests he doesn't want to take, and he'd much rather spend the day like he planned to—with Charlie.

* * *

The next time he vomits up petals, this time more than one, five, and without the rush of blood to punctuate it, Robbie's walking up the driveway, back into his house, and he can still hear the squeal of the tires on Charlie's car as he pulls away.

Thankfully, the camera is off.

Robbie's incredibly worried, now. He tried to just ignore what happened to him and enjoy the day, labelling it with some practical explanation he doesn't yet have the words or knowledge to explain, but, in the aftermath of this, he can't ignore it. His Google search earlier yielded no results. It was as if this illness just appeared from nowhere in the wee hours of that morning, and he was the first person to ever be affected by it. That further leans him toward a practical explanation, the one he can't explain properly, if at all.

But he knows that it's _not_ something explainable, and that's why he's so scared.

* * *

When it happens again, sans a few incidents with petals ranging in count from one to four, it's been a month and he's nearly forgotten about it all within the tide of more important things. Despite this, his secret nearly comes out, diving along the line of what's been revealed and what's still hidden, and it is by his own luck and quick wit that he isn't discovered.

Charlie's talking to him about something Robbie can't remember, even though it was Robbie who asked the question that got him to talk, for the sake of his webcast; Robbie doesn't listen to the words, just to the inflection of Charlie's soft yet ragged voice, so beautiful to his ears. It's as if someone crafted a voice to fit perfectly to everything Robbie ever liked in any sound, deviating never, and Charlie could be telling Robbie how much he hates him and Robbie would still listen with a huge smile rising on his face, paralyzed by his love and acute need for someone like Charlie to keep him grounded.

They're leaned up against their lockers, out of the way of the torrents of students filling the hallway, but it doesn't help for much, to keep others away from them, because Robbie spots Kirby strolling toward them in the depths of the flood with the confidence he never had, flanked by Jill and Olivia on either side, as always, an audience to Robbie's suffering.

He knows what Kirby wants, and it destroys him.

What destroys him even more is the gleam in Charlie's steely blue eyes that says he wants it, too. It's as if Charlie looked straight at Robbie and told him that nothing mattered to him but her, and their friendship was merely a means to an end for him.

And as Charlie turns his attention to Kirby, and smiles erupt on their faces, Robbie has to turn away—he can't handle it.

He feels the sensation again, this time segmented with brief flashes of pain.

He manages to reach up to his ear and get the camera turned off as he opens his locker and pretends to look for something, coughing up petals the entire time. He stands, leaned into the darkness as if it will protect him, for a few long minutes until Kirby leaves, and, once she's gone, and he can see Charlie through the corner of his eye, his attention approaching again, Robbie takes a look at the petals, more than he's ever seen come out of him at one time, scattered over his books.

All yellow.

He does not bother to count them.

He shuts the door and turns his camera back on before anyone can wonder what happened to him, that he had to duck out of existence like that.

* * *

Robbie brings up petals more frequently, now, and it's getting more and more difficult to hide. Sometimes he coughs them up, sometimes it's more like vomiting, and sometimes he just finds them in his mouth along with a burst of pain in his lungs, but whichever it is, it produces gagging noises, and, when it happens in public, he has to fight viciously to hide it all.

When he wakes up in the morning, his pillow is coated with the petals that he coughed up in his sleep, scattered in his sheets, strewn over the floor, stuck to his cheek with a line of saliva or a droplet of blood. When he's sitting in class, he'll occasionally break into coughing fits and have to go stand by the trash can as to have a place to take the petals to; usually, he wraps them in a tissue and hides them under a mess of papers.

One of those forced habits is noticeable to him, and the other to everyone else, but that's not really what concerns him.

What concerns him most is the camera constantly strapped to his head.

He could go to a doctor and get this all figured out, but he's confident that any doctor would think he's either gone crazy and lock him in a mental institution or monitor him in hopes that he's just stuffing petals down his throat for attention—he has a webcast, anyway, so he's already doomed to people believing that he's an attention whore. But, until he does that, he's going to be cursed to having to reach that button every time he feels the urge to vomit up petals, whether it comes in the middle of a Q&A session or not. It's the curse of being him, when a lot of things are already the curse of existing as Robbie Mercer.

He notices eventually that when he's around Charlie, he feels fewer urges to cough, and the amount of petals decreases when he does have to; he usually just coughs them into his mouth and swallows them back down, when he's in public, so it's a welcome alteration. He has no explanation of that, but if it's another reason to be around Charlie, he'll take it.

And he notices something else, too, something he probably should have noticed earlier but didn't, since he hadn't really brought together that outside events could interfere with his illness. Whenever Kirby's around, he coughs more. So he strategically avoids her, in an opposite of the reason he stays around Charlie.

But it's hard to avoid someone when your best friend has a raging crush on them that's been going since he was fourteen.

They're at school, in the hallway, like the time Robbie threw up flowers into his locker, and Charlie's talking to her one day, adoration gleaming in his eyes, and Robbie has to watch in horror, and suddenly, he feels the urge to vomit tugging at his gut. Something grows between his lungs, swelling, filling him. And, suddenly, he can't get away fast enough, when he was perfectly content to watch and suffer in silence before.

He limps away in search of a bathroom, somewhere private where he can cough up his petals in peace, but he fears deeply that he won't get there in time. The hallways hum around him, and with that humming of noise comes the crowds, the surroundings, the things that keep him from getting away quick enough; he draws past classroom after classroom, but Woodsboro High is fairly large, for a small town's only high school, and he can't move nearly fast enough to beat the need burning in him.

The taste of ash and the bubbling heat in the back of his mouth hits him too hard just as he steps into the bathroom, before he can get into a stall, and he feels a flower petal slip out. He watches it drift to the floor, weightless alone but sodden and heavy with his saliva.

However, his camera is off, and no one is around, so he simply leaves it there and leans over a toilet, door locked and double-checked behind him in the exact way someone who is vomiting up flower petals and wants no one to find out would do, and he sits there, on his knees, face held over the bowl until long past the bell.

He doesn't care that he's late. He just wants to know what's wrong with him. It's like the beginning of a movie, the kind of sci-fi horror he and Charlie would love to watch together. And, this time, he's not the audience, but the main character.

Thinking of how much Charlie would enjoy seeing a movie about this makes another surge of petals hit the back of Robbie's throat.

* * *

He pieces it together too late; now that he has it all figured out, he is coughing up full flowers, complete with stems. They get tangled up in his throat, because the stems are so long, and, once, he even had to pull a stem out of his sinus cavity by tugging the flower through his mouth. Thankfully, that happened at home, and not around Charlie.

Speaking of Charlie, that is his solution, or, at least, what he believes, wrongfully or not, that the solution is. When Charlie is paying attention to him, Robbie rarely has to ever stop and cough up flowers. When Charlie is away, and Robbie thinks of him, which happens a lot, or when he's inches away but talking to someone else, _especially_ Kirby, Robbie can't take it, and he gets the urges again. It's as if the flowers can see Charlie and determine when he's not occupied with Robbie.

Robbie has to wonder what that means. It's been months, more than enough time to put together the patterns and figure it all out, but he could spend the rest of his life trying to determine what those patterns imply and never come up with a proper answer he believes in. Charlie is like a brother to him, sure, but Robbie considers their relationship even more intimate than that, for more reasons than one, his sexuality, his need, the fact that Charlie sometimes feels like the only person who knows him. Robbie loves him. He knew that since long before he coughed up that first bloody petal.

But piecing that all together? It makes no sense. There's no way love unreturned could make a perfectly healthy seventeen-year-old cough up blood and flowers. It's psychological, not physical, and, really, Robbie tells himself every day that he's not bothered that Charlie's straight and will never have feelings for him, so if anything were to make him sick, it should not have been something like that.

Whatever happens, the flowers and Charlie seem to be correlated.

But Robbie fears it might be too late for them. He's growing weaker day by day; when his parents were out on a date, he fainted going up the stairs to his room, and on _camera_ , of course, because, apparently, life felt as though it hadn't fucked him enough already.

And it was Charlie, who had been watching his webcast, who, knowing his parents were out, dropped by and made sure he was okay. Thankfully, Robbie hadn't vomited any petals, and even if he had, he doubted Charlie would have questioned them; he'd have been too worried about the medical status of his best friend.

He remembers hearing Charlie heading in through the unlocked door and coming for him, and Robbie, though content with what he got, a hand clasped over his half-conscious cheek and multiple reiterations of questions probing if he was okay, if an ambulance needed to be called... Robbie really just wanted a kiss.

Charlie didn't leave until Robbie's parents texted and said they were on their way back and Robbie desperately asked Charlie to leave and not to tell them. If they didn't watch his webcast, and, they didn't, then they would never have to know and take him to a doctor, he reasoned. And Charlie listened, with that look in his gorgeous blue bulging doe eyes, and Robbie had so many more reasons to want him.

As soon as Charlie had shut the door behind him and Robbie had signed off _Hall Pass_ , Robbie coughed up four more yellow carnations, right onto the couch that Charlie had led him to and set him up with a blanket on.

Now there's a rumor about his health status swarming his high school, people who saw the webcast or heard about it from their friends asking each other if he's diabetic or if he has some kind of heart issue that would make him faint like that.

But Robbie isn't all that worried. No one will figure out that he's coughing up flowers, and, even if they do, no one will figure out the reason _why_ he's coughing up flowers.

But if anyone did, his life would be over.

* * *

A few weeks later, in the middle of a Cinema Club meeting, Charlie's getting a little more violently passionate than he should be explaining how _T_ _he Green Mile_ is the best adaptation ever brought to screen, talking with his hands and a fire burning in his voice and blazing in his eyes like an angered Baptist preacher, when Robbie looks at him and finds that he can no longer look away, that Charlie is too hypnotizing and his vision is stuck permanently affixed to him.

Robbie feels it taking over him; his entire body is shivering so rapidly that he can't control it, especially in his limbs, his fingers, his toes, all the lanky, noodly parts that are normally so dexterous. The taste of something burnt, charred into cinders, fills his mouth, like he's breathing smoke, and every breath feels labored, ragged, struggled for, as though someone's pressing a heavy dumbbell down between his chest and stomach.

Robbie has always wanted Charlie around as much as possible. He could have spent an eternity's eternity huddled up to Charlie, talking about _Stab_ , laughing at all the witty things he would say, considering all the insightful headcanons and the things Charlie saw but Robbie missed. He's never wanted Charlie to leave. But, right now, Robbie sees the need. If Charlie didn't exist, this all might have never happened.

Or maybe he'd have always needed to latch onto someone like Charlie, a face and a personality existing only in Robbie's mind in the universe where Charlie never happened to be born, and he'd have started vomiting flowers over the person permanently trapped in his head by the curse of being fictional instead.

Whatever could have stopped it, Robbie can't breathe.

He can't _breathe._

Something's climbing up his throat; he feels himself brace against it, folding at the waist. He knows his face must look desperate, but he doesn't care about anything but oxygen.

Robbie's eyes sweep the desks around him—everyone's staring at him with looks of worry and shock and paranoia. Some girl runs to the door, frenzied, frantic, and opens it to shout desperately for the help that won't come. Charlie's noticed his peril, too, and stopped talking, looking down at him with horror glinting in his eyes.

Then Robbie doesn't have the energy to stand anymore. He feels Charlie's hands on his back, trying to help him but unknowing that the situation is so hopeless, and he collapses beneath them, onto the hard floor, spiraling further out of reach.

"I'm sorry," Robbie puffs out over the bulge buried in his throat, climbing up into his mouth, suffocating him.

He realizes that he should have just told someone. Charlie would have had to find out about Robbie's feelings sometime, whether that be as an explanation for why Robbie had flowers growing in his lungs or through some other means, and, no matter the consequences of that, if Robbie saw a doctor, he might have lived. And he would have lost Charlie whether he drove him away with his sexuality or through his death.

Robbie coughs up a single flower, stem and all. He can see the long, tangled roots that hang out of his lips, trailing back into his mouth, fastened somewhere in his lungs, and the pool of blood, _his_ blood, glistening red on the floor in front of him.

Then everything goes black, and Robbie glances up so that the very last thing he ever sees is Charlie.


End file.
